Bicycles and News in the WWDC Keynote

Going on ten years now of blogging about bicycles, and I’d never expect to see the naked bike ride in an Apple developer keynote

…or a BMX Sidehack.

Strava was mentioned too and that’s no surprise with their Apple Watch App. I’m expecting long rides spent listening to Beats1 radio, and who knows maybe Mark V will start posting his playlists to Music Connect.

What we’re listening to is now a regular feature of our magazine that started with this article in issue 15, another in issue 22, and a ride story in issue 25 dropping later this week. There’s also been a mention of Mateo (America’s first white mariachi singer), and what happened this one time on a bike ride near the studio where REM recorded the album “Green.”

As Jimmy Iovine said in the keynote, “Technology and art move culture.”

They do and into the space where the bike and tech meet.

Regarding iOS tech, I was following closely along because of the new News app. Besides a mobile web view, Bike Hugger magazine runs on the iOS Newsstand app with a per month or annual subscription model. What does the Apple News format means for Bike Hugger’s content? Waiting for 29th Street Publishing to debrief me. We partnered a little over 2 years ago on micropublishing content, and expecting people to pay for it.

I noticed the same thing Josh Sterns did in this tweet, and that’s certainly encouraging for independent publishers.

Didn’t go into all the details, as there was so much Sturm und Drang over what Medium is last week, but we have a custom domain here now, on a “networked” publishing platform. The intent is to give our magazine a fresh face where I think a key demographic is (sell subscriptions too).

Whatever happens next with Apple News (and Music), expect to find our brand of bike content published there, and what we’re listening to as well.

While I was all caught up in the bike mentions and what’s going on with the content I publish, for more analysis, see Joshua Benton’s article on why this was the most important set of Apple announcements in years

It’s an awful lot like Flipboard — though the awesome power of default Apple distribution puts it in an entirely other league. This app will be on hundreds of millions of devices within 24 hours of its debut.

…apps for publications like magazines and newspapers should never have been buried in a weird little corner of their own anyway. The publishers we work with are making amazing apps that people love to read, love to subscribe to (yeah, that matters!) and one of the biggest constraints on their growth and adoption has been the fact that they’re not just regular apps that can be promoted and discovered right in the app store like everything else.